Re: Blocks are still taking way too long.

Over 30 minutes for a single confirmation does not (and will not ever) work in the real world.
(Almost) Every time I start to believe that BTC is "going mainstream", I have a delay waiting for a 30+ minute block.... Shocked

solution:
if your paying for a coffee or a mars bar, dont wait. if your buying a house wait 30 minutes

solution:
if your paying for a coffee or a mars bar, use LTC or DOGE. if your buying a house wait 30 minutes Wink

One confirmation with LTC or DOGE is much less secure then a 0/unconfirmed TX with bitcoin. Both of their network is not secure so it would be easy to attack the network and reverse your TX. Once a TX is propagated throughout the network, nodes will not accept TXs that use the same inputs so you will not be able to broadcast a TX that spends the same inputs, the only way to double spend is to confirm a block that uses at least one of the same inputs as what you just spent. As long as the value of your cup of coffee is less then what it costs to mine the next block then you are almost certainly safe to accept a 0/unconfirmed TX after the TX has been properly propigated

Not disagreeing with you , but isnt LTC fairly secure?

It is the most secure altcoin out there as of now but the short block time gives a misleading picture as to how secure it's network is. Even if it has the same difficulty as bitcoin it's 2.5 minute block time means that it takes 25% of the work to find one block and there will be at least 4x as many orphaned blocks.

If you want to do an apple to apples comparison of network security the LTC network has a difficulty of ~36.5 thousands now, compared to 35 million for bitcoin. Granted BTC and LTC miners are not interchangeable but I think this gives a pretty good comparison as to how easy it would be to attack either network.